Fear of a Gorilla Falling

64 ryan j. browne Fear of a gorilla falling All the books said gorillas don’t climb, so a fear of the most unsophisticated kind, like mother dying or, for some boys, living another year with another man. Then, there are moments of coming true and these are terrible moments. Our tapping on glass, our children’s laughter so close to true alarm we’d swear the gorilla’s loose. And it is. It is knocking on our door, it is tickling our necks, it is atop a peppercorn tree, a spectacle. The wind blows and we notice the hair on its face for the first time. It appears to have a long mind, like a child in thought. It turns away before launching itself. Shattered glass, breaking necks, it exhausts the marrow of gravity. Once fallen, the hulk wrecked, what’s found inside is no circus, no promise broken because it was never made. CRSUM09 poetry.indd 64 5/22/2009 12:37:03 PM ...